What’s the Real Problem? Young Motherhood, Stigma, and Reproductive Justice

For the last couple of years, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health has been doing a lot to turn around the conversation on teen pregnancy and young motherhood. From sitting on advisory tables on reproductive health at the White House, to releasing our white paper on removing stigma, to working with legislators to introduce legislation that would help young mothers succeed, we’ve been challenging the stigmatizing narratives that paint young mothers as irresponsible, hopeless, and drains on the state.

We’ve been telling legislators, colleagues, and advocates around the nation what Latina activists on the ground have known for a long time: that the circumstances of pregnancy and birth exist within a context of racial and socioeconomic inequity; that any conversation about teen pregnancy is incomplete without a conversation about access to the full range of reproductive health care for young people, including abortion; and that young women who choose to become mothers continue to be human, and deserve as much opportunity to lead fulfilling lives as women who delay their pregnancies or choose not to parent at all.

So it is with great excitement that we present our newest campaign: What’s the Real Problem?

So that you can take this work to your community, we’ve put together a toolkit for different ways to discuss this issue in your community, from film screenings to story collecting; and a very cool poster, which has some useful facts on the back, for you to put up as a conversation-starter and use as a reference. We’ve worked really hard on these materials and are super proud of them, and we hope you’ll find them useful and accessible (they’re bilingual). We think that with these materials, you can help us steer the conversation in the right direction, and get folks asking themselves what the real problem is when it comes to young motherhood.